1/06/2009 @ 12:01AM

Russia Looks At America, Sees Itself

Highly authoritative foreign sources predict that the U.S. will fall apart in or around the year 2010.

The country as we know it will disintegrate into six distinct blocs, each bloc seceding under the influence of a foreign power, with Alaska going back to the Russians. California and environs will become a kind of Chinese satellite, while an expanded entity dubbed the Republic of Texas will crawl under the hegemonic protection of Mexico. It all begins to unfold next autumn with civil war and a collapse of the dollar.

Preposterous, you might say. Not even laugh-worthy. But do not click away from the page. At least not yet. Consider the author of the forecast, a top Russian institutional figure with unimpeachable credentials, namely Professor Igor Panarin, a former KGB analyst and currently dean at Moscow’s Foreign Ministry academy for future diplomats.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article about him, Professor Panarin “is no fringe figure. … He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.”

The article continues, “In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin’s ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country’s top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.”

I would ask that all of you who have heralded the return of Russia as a player on the world stage, and those of you who swallowed the Kremlin propaganda about who provoked the recent war in Georgia, and indeed anyone who takes comfort in the notion that Russia is back as a predictable, unified Great Power with a coherent sense of policy or strategy, pay close attention.

The article tells us that in recent weeks Panarin has been interviewed twice a day on Russian state media. Consider that, as in the Soviet era, it takes approval from above, way above, for leading media outlets to give so much air time to such a figure.

Put another way, the Kremlin either buys into Panarin’s scenario or feels that the Russian public needs exposure to it. And perhaps, as the Russian leadership sends warships to Venezuela and Cuba, they also intend that the U.S. public be aware of Panarin’s vision. Are you getting the point yet? At the very least, you should consider what it means that someone like Professor Panarin sits at the head of Moscow’s top school for diplomats!

Like some macabre echoing laughtrack, the meta-implications resound on and on until you get a growing, chilling sensation of how it feels to live in Putin’s Russia. Let us try to stay this side of sanity and take the matter straight on. Panarin clearly feels that whatever happened to the Soviet Union and might yet happen to the Russian Federation, can equally happen to the U.S. This would presuppose that the U.S. and Russia operate comparable systems with critical flaws common to both.

In other words, one would have to conclude that neither the Professor nor anyone in the Kremlin has the remotest sense of what makes the American system tick or what makes theirs lousy. One is reduced to psycho-babble terminology: Panarin is projecting. He might even be channeling. That is, he’s giving voice to popular Russian hopes and complexes. What does that tell you about the degraded aspirations of the citizenry or the abject conditions of Russian public discourse?

From Rasputin to Lysenko, even down to dialectical materialism, the Russian soul and the Russian state have shown a disquieting penchant for gaga hypotheses founded in superstition or pseudoscience.

Behold Panarin’s vision: The bizarre hodge-podge of fact and fantasy at play here offers a clue to the state of the Russian mind these days. We are told that Panarin “based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts [a kind of National Security Agency], he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.”

Nobody in the U.S. would pretend that the country does not face serious problems. But to proceed from that to a doomsday scenario of disintegration betrays a laughable ignorance of the U.S., and what’s worse, utter blindness to the basic processes of history. Apparently one needs to remind Russians of the elementary notion that totalitarian systems fall apart whereas democratic systems respond and adapt. (Doesn’t anybody read John Stuart Mill over there?)

One concludes that Russians think not in terms of consent and opportunity, but of empires and enforced unions with barely suppressed discontents roiling just beneath the surface that any moment can threaten the entire edifice.

Perhaps it’s best to speak directly in what might seem like assertions of the obvious. Russia is not America. Americans don’t regard democratic values as a kind of screen behind which to build or hold together an empire for empire’s sake. Sure, the U.S. has tolerated and even connived with authoritarian systems. But it has done so to protect democratic values in the long run. The U.S. has fought world wars and other wars abroad. It may have done so at times brutally or ineptly but never cynically for the purposes of power or empire alone.

Americans genuinely believe that their kind of system, broadly speaking, ultimately delivers the greatest good for the greatest number, and they have empirical evidence to show for it at home and abroad. It may be idealistic or naive, but it’s a genuine conviction.

What sort of happiness, over centuries of trying, has Moscow delivered either to its own citizens, to subject peoples in the Russian landmass, or to anyone abroad? It’s no good dismissing this argument as a species of Russophobia–I am talking empirically. Let us say that the U.S. falls apart and Russia becomes the sole superpower and model for other nations worldwide. What sort of a model would that be? What exactly should other countries emulate?

Until Russia can answer such questions with the merest trace of coherence, it has no business looking at the U.S. as a mirror.